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Earth Angel

Ian Johns at the Southwark Playhouse, SE1

December 2 2004, 12:00am, The Times

“DELVING into the depths of a woman subverted,” proclaims the poster for Earth Angel, devised and performed by Catherine Hoffmann. For all the soil it shifts during its 70 minutes I’m not certain it digs deep.

Through a gauze we see a bedroom and an agitated Hoffmann, a willowy figure with a cascade of hair that would have had the Pre-Raphaelites queuing up, emerge from under a crushed green velvet blanket, her hunched contours having resembled some mossy bank. A filmed sequence, projected on to the gauze, shows swirling snow across a full moon giving way to a blindfolded Hoffmann in a nightdress luxuriating in flowers planted in the kind of bed you sleep in.